Air Roasted Potatoes

These air roasted duck fat roasted potatoes come out crispy, crunchy and golden-brown on the outside, and moist and fluffy on the inside. When one of these hits your mouth, a smile will spread across your face and your knees will go weak.

Roasting the potatoes in an air fryer such as an Actifry™ makes them quick and dead-easy, as well as healthier even than the same amount of mashed potatoes. And, it frees up your oven.

Using duck fat, rather than olive oil, means that you actually end up using way less cooking fat, because the duck fat doesn’t evaporate and get absorbed into the potatoes in the way that the olive oil does. While the Actifry advertising would say that only a tablespoon of oil is needed for stuff like this, really, to get results as good as with the one tablespoon of duck fat you would have to use 3 or 4 tablespoons of oil.

Duck fat is a healthier fat, nutritionally half-way between butter and olive oil.

Weigh out the potatoes. For 4 people, you want about 1 kg (2 pounds / 7 medium-sized potatoes.) You can use a bit more potato if you wish -- up to 50% without necessarily needing more duck fat.

Peel the potatoes. Pop them into a bowl of water for 30 minutes to 1 hour (more is fine). This helps to leech starch out of them, which results in a crisper product at the end. If you don't have time to let them stand in water to soak, at least give them a quick swirl in a pot or basin of water or a quick rinse under the tap. Then, before proceeding, dry in a salad spinner or pat dry in a tea towel. That's another secret to good roast potatoes, is getting moisture out of the roasting environment because you don't want them to steam.

Cut the potatoes into chunks about 5 cm (2 inches) in size.

Put 1 tablespoon of duck fat into the Actifry; heat it for 2 minutes. Add the chunked potato. Cook for 30 minutes. (Note: to be clear, yes, you leave the paddle in for the entire cooking.) Check the potatoes gently with a fork for doneness inside, and check them visually for an appealing golden colour. Feel free to give them another 5 or 10 minutes if they need it to get nice and crispy.

Serve piping hot.

For some reason, leftover roasted potatoes never seem to reheat as good as when freshly made, so you're best to make just as much as you need. If you do need to reheat leftover roasted potatoes, a few minutes in the Actifry is the best way to do it.

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I personally never wander out of earshot of the machine while doing these, as occasionally you just get a batch of potatoes whose wedges insist on getting jammed between the paddle and the interior edge of the handle with the paddle making struggling noises as it still tries to move, and I’m worried about burning the engine out. (The jamming can happen particularly in the first 20 minutes or so, when the potato chunks are still quite hard.)

You can of course make these without peeling the potatoes, but they won’t crisp up in that classic roasted potato way.

What potato works best? If you’re in the UK (or anywhere else) where you can get Desiree, King Edward or Maris Piper, try those. If you’re in North America where potatoes are just sold generically by the bag as “all-purpose table potatoes“, they will generally work just fine. I’ve tried buying the special russets for baking, thinking they might do nicely, and they do, but not more so than the far less expensive generic potatoes in the bags.

1 kg (2.2 pounds) of unpeeled potatoes equals 750g (26.5oz) of peeled potato. Based on this, total Weight Watchers PointsPlus® in the recipe are 18 (14 for the peeled potato, and 4 for the duck fat.) The finished yield after roasting (the potatoes lose a lot of their water weight) is 475g / 17 oz / 3 1/2 cups. Using 1.2 kg (2.5 pounds) of unpeeled will increase number of 1/2 cup servings to 8, but keep per serving points at 3.

* Nutrition info provided by https://caloriecount.about.com

* PointsPlus™ calculated by hotairfrying.com. Not endorsed by Weight Watchers® International, Inc, which is the owner of the PointsPlus® registered trademark.